NO DINNER ON FRIDAYS

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 45, 17 November 1936, Page 8

NO DINNER ON FRIDAYS

If it had been suggested to certain good people in Auckland last November that if they voted for the Labour Party they would get no dinners at their boardinghouses on Fridays, they would have laughed unbelief. But so, apparently, it has come, to pass.. Private hotels have had a complicated problem to solve in adjusting their working to the requirements of the Government’s legislation. The solution has narrowed itself to a choice between increase of staffing and consequent loss—either to the hotel, or to the boarder in higher ra t es —or cutting out the Friday night dinner and telling boarders to fend for themselves in restaurants. The vision of these nomadic diners pursuing their quest on a cold winter’s night should bring tears to the eyes of the Minister of Labour. The situation no doubt has a comical aspect, but it contains abo a moral for legislators—look before you leap. In its haste to implement its idealisms, the Government often failed to look before it leaped. The plight of Auckland’s Friday night diners may be an instalment of other personal inconveniences to come. If this can happen of the Friday dinner, what may be the fate of the Tuesday breakfast or the Wednesday lunch? But |>erhaps by the time the Socialist millennium has been reached we shall all be living on tabloids, carrying our meals about with us in our waistcoat pockets. Steak and onions will be a dim memory of a bourgeois past.